Dewey Phillips

Broadcasting on WHBQ in Memphis six nights a week from 9:00 pm until midnight, Dewey Phillips was tremendously popular with both black and white listeners in the 1950s. An excitable, flamboyant good old boy who seemed to have stepped from the pages of Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strips but who played cutting-edge rhythm and blues, Phillips had an uncanny ability to pick hits and hit makers, including Jerry Lee Lewis and Memphis’s own Elvis Presley.

When Sun Records’ Sam Phillips (no relation) gave the deejay an advance copy of Presley’s remake of Arthur (“Big Boy”) Crudup’s “That’s All Right” in July 1954, Dewey was floored. On his show the next night, he played the acetate some 30 times. He invited the singer to the studio for an interview, but Presley, aware his record might be played and anxious about it, had gone to the movies. Presley’s parents hunted down their son and took him to the WHBQ studios. Phillips chatted with the shy, nervous Presley as if he were just getting him to relax. When Presley declared himself ready to begin the interview, Phillips told him that it was already over; he had left the microphone on during their warm-up conversation.

In 1956 Phillips hosted Pop Shop, a television dance program that was so popular locally that it kept American Bandstand off Memphis television screens for six months.